insane_alien

well, everyone has to start somewhere. made a few stupid suggestions when i was starting out as well(like how to turn my remote control car into a perpetual motion device through regenerative breaking)

and how would our galaxy move faster than the speed of light? and how could our galaxy have had so many different shapes and sizes in its past? and what about the galaxies our one is devouring as we speak? is our galaxy eating its past self? kind of a bit absurd with some temporal paradoxes thrown in.

well, the basic building block of the brain is the neuron. this is an electrochemical system which can be fully understood with the principles of chemistry. sure, we haven't catalogued every single reaction and compound but we understand the underlying principles of them. if we understand the basic building blocks enough to know there are few quantum effects(the ones that crop up uncertainty at least, chemical bonding depends somewhat on quantum mechanics but thats good an predictable) then we can be reasonably sure that the larger structure can be explained in their absence. for instance, there is a large structure made out of bricks. the structure is too complicated to fully understand or grasp. the bricks on the other hand are easy to understand(relatively), we know that the structure is made only out of bricks. ass the bricks do not display any jelly like properties(translucent and tasty), we can say that the larger structure will not display jelly like properties(translucent and tasty).

my room has no heating whatsoever. just great wads of insulation. it's even quite isolated againstthe rest of the house. i do have a big window though, its one of those velux ones that is sloped with the roof. it also has a blackout blind that is unfortunately stuck halfway down. it keeps my room warm, if i don't open the window and keep my door shut i can get the room up to around 40*C in winter(a scottish winter at that). don't want to try it in summer. i can't stand more than 25*C for long anyway unless i have no choice in the matter.

you could try ubuntu if you aren't tied down to any microsoft only apps. you don't need to reinstall even if you are upgrading to the latest and greatest.(just need to reboot after an upgrade, takes around an hour)

i doubt it. there are far better ways of doing it. and seeing as we don't know the application, a non contact heat exchanger is probably a better idea than a contact one.

Snail, not only is that an incredibly inefficient way of cooling something(it won't work the way you think it will) all it will result in is liquid nitrogen getting flung everywhere. think throwing water on a chip pan fire but the temperature range has been shifted somewhat. very little water will actually get to the point of freezing except the droplets that get thrown off by flash boiling liquid nitrogen.

okay, heres some reasons why we know the electron isn't a black hole. for any object with mass less than the planck mass (which is that of a small housefly) the event horizon will be smaller than a planck length and will not make any sort of physical sense. as i recall, the electron is considerably less massive than a housefly.

fuel cells require no more(less actually) platinum(or any platinide element) catalyst/electrodes than your standard catalytic converter, pretty much every car has one of those on its exhaust pipe.

i bought some CO detectors because of this. not because i'm making nanbread but i'm thinking of messing around with CO as its not a chemical i've ever used. don't want to accidentally poison myself.

isn't the average IQ 100 by definition?

you are mistaking science for engineering. engineers apply the principles discovered deducted by science to practical situations. for instance, a chemist may discover some new wonder chemical (say a fuel) but the would not cover the actual production. in a lab 1kg is a lot of stuff to be working with at one time. it would be up to chemical engineers to devise a way of making the chemical in bulk and at a reasonable price. the industrial method is unlikely to be anything like the lab scale production method as all sorts of interesting and annoying side reactions suddenly appear. not to mention lab grade reactants are often much much purer than what a full scale plant is going to be working with.

the water is only in the pipe. the water boils, forces water out then when the steam hits the submerged portion of the pipe it condenses rapidly creating a vacuum which sucks in more water which gets boiled ... repeat until candle goes out.

ah, external combustion pulsejet. i thought of that one but i couldn't find it on google.

biology is an emergent property of chemistry. conciousness is an emergent property of neural networks. and tell me, how is something that mimics a neuron in every way functionally diffeerent from an actual neuron? for instance, i can simulate a transistor or any other electrical component in a few lines of code. if i link these up in the right way, i could fully emulate a pentium pro or a core 2 duo or what ever. if i can emulate the basic subunit of the brain(neuron) then it would be only a matter of cloning the structure to acheive an emulated brain. neurons are not all that complex to emulate either. we do it in neural networks all the time. its just that there are so damn many of them.

we can simulate the functions of neurons in a computer. we can simulate the way the react. if we had the resources(vastly beyond todays capabilities but acheivable) we could simulate an entire human brain in realtime. would this have conciousness if fed stimuli that mimics sight, hearing, touch etc. i would say yes, it would be behaviourally human. the only difference is that it wouldn't be organic.

try the first two references on the wikipedia page.

if its just over night the extra water can keep the plant slightly warmer(due to the extra heat capacity) so the plant is not frozen as long. and will help thawing in the morning. thats one way it could be. there are probably other factors at play but they are likely biological.

well, CO detectors tend to go off well before dangerous levels. also, the nan breads are probably just bumping the present CO level past the threshold of the alarm. i doubt a nanbread in itself would be enough to trigger it. but if its adding to already present CO then it would be enough.

hmm, check the time AND increase your upper body strength.

yep, sounds like a steam engine to me. he may be thinking more along the lines of a jet effect like the aeolipile rather than a turbine or piston.

well, there was only some quizzes on webct for about 10% of the marks but those turned into a disaster as well(they only worked sporadically and often marked stuff that was correct as wrong) so he just gave us those marks anyway. there was no other course work. we've heard similar stories from the fourth years who had classes by the same lecturer. apparently they went and complained to the dean about him. he's not a poplar guy at the moment.

they might not be burnt but there will still be some degree of reaction. just incomplete burning of nanbread, unless you have a few thousand going at all times and lock yourself in that room and make it reasonably airtight then you have nothing to worry about. you'd probably die from the heat before CO poisoning.

i cheat, i have a watch that does both analogue and digital i don't really have a preference tbh, i can read both formats just as quickly. except when i've been drinking more than is good for me. then i preffer analogue as i can still make sense of that when i lose the ability to read.

have you performed any of the proposed experiments?